Sig Christenson is a veteran military reporter who has made nine trips to the war zone. He writes regularly for Hearst about service members, veterans and heroes, among other topics. He is also the co-founder and former president of Military Reporters and Editors, founded in 2002.

Blogs

06/28/2013

The two-year sentence handed to Senior Airman Christopher Oliver on
Wednesday marks what I believe is the 22nd completed trial in the
ongoing scandal among basic training instructors at Joint Base San
Antonio-Lackland.

It’s a good place to pick up the interview I did last week with the
Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Mark Welsh III. He talks about core
values – the ideals that all airmen are supposed to live by but, in the
case of as many as 33 Lackland military training instructors, failed to
do.

Every MTI and recruit sees the values in signs posted on the base.
They are “integrity,” “service before self” and “excellence in all we
do,” and were crafted by another Air Force chief, the now-retired Gen.
Ronald Fogleman.

In his “Little Blue Book,” a manual on core values he ordered to be
given to young airmen, Fogleman defined integrity as “the inner voice;
the voice of self-control; the basis for the trust imperative in today’s
military.”

“The Air Force talks about this a lot,” Welsh said in the interview.
“This is what our core values are all about. The idea of integrity,
service and excellence and with respect kind of woven into all three of
those is, again, it’s foundational to what we want to be as a service.

“We talk about it all the time. What we’re doing right now is looking
at – is there a different way as people come into the Air Force to
ensure that the people we bring on, whether they’re officers or NCOs or
civilians, understand very clearly the expectation and standards of
behavior – both self-behavior and behavior toward others – that live in
our service. And then make sure they understand the reasons behind those
expectations and why they’re so important to accomplishing our mission,
which is the bottom line for us.

“But we know if we don’t take great care, better care constantly of
our people, that we won’t be as good at getting that mission done as we
need to be, and the mission is to fight and win our nation’s wars. It’s a
pretty significant mission, and we’ve got to be good at this, which
means we have to have the best people possible, which means we have to
take better care of them than anyone else does, in my opinion.”

06/24/2013

Those of you who are familiar with how our business works might
wonder what didn’t get into the story we did last weekend that was based
on an interview with Gen. Mark Welsh III, the Air Force’s chief of
staff.

Well, a lot didn’t get in. He talked more than 39 minutes about the
sexual misconduct scandal at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland and the
larger issue of assaults throughout the military.

What he said helped advance our understanding of what has transpired
in the 19 months since the San Antonio Express-News broke the first
story on basic training instructor abuses at Lackland, and I’m going to
share what he said in this space over the coming days – unfiltered, in a
straight-up transcript.

A little about Welsh. He was born in San Antonio and calls Austin
home. His mom, Peg, 83, still lives there. And he has a fine sense of
humor. As our interview began he said, “I was born in (the old) Brooke
Army Medical Center. I’m sure the plaque is still there. I’m surprised
you haven’t seen it.”

I wish there had been more laughs in that interview, but this issue
is as heavy as they get and our series of blogs starts, by the way, as
another military training instructor trial begins later this morning at
Lackland. Here is the first 6 minutes, 52 seconds, with more to come
tomorrow and the rest of the week.

Q: Overall, what has been your reaction to the revelations of sexual misconduct among people in the Air Force?

“It’s not a new problem to the Air Force. We’ve had this problem
along with everybody else in the country for a long time and as a
commander I’ve seen it before, I’ve tried to work hard to help prevent
it and take care of victims and do those things before. I’ve been
surprised lately by the cases that have become public just because it’s
surprising that people who are doing some of the things, like the guy
working in our sexual assault response case (Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski).
We’ll see what that trial turns out, but the guy – he worked here on the
Air Staff – he was the branch chief of a four-person branch that worked
the policy stuff related to this.

“There was a little bit of a characterization that he ran sexual
assault programs for the Air Force. I think that’s a bit of a
stretch. That’s my job and our four-star major command commanders’ jobs
and our command chiefs’ jobs and our squadron commanders and group
commanders and wing commanders and wing commanders and every
supervisor’s job, but having anybody associated directly with the
hands-on policy or execution of this program who would do something like
that is stunning, quite frankly, to me and to everybody else. So every
time an allegation like that surfaces anywhere, it kind of stops you in
your tracks.”

Sexual assault is ‘horrible, it’s completely unacceptable’

“Look, you and I both know the crime is horrible, it’s completely
unacceptable. It’s not something that any of us can afford to tolerate
and nor in my view, the characterizations that the military has
tolerated this is just an improper characterization. It’s just not true.
Horrible cases have occurred, the crime is horrible every time it
occurs, wherever it occurs, and we certainly haven’t stopped the
problem, which is our fault, and we have to fix this. And we’re doing
everything we can to do that, but it’s not for lack of effort and it’s
not because every commander in the Air Force is trying to somehow sweep
the problem under the rug, which is one of the ways this has been
characterized. That’s ridiculous. It’s not because that our commanders
and our legal teams don’t work well together, because they do. The
commander-(Judge Advocate General) team is fundamental to the way we
operate as a service and it works very, very well together. They’re not
great distances apart almost ever, and I think we have the statistics to
prove that, and so some of the things that are most concerning to me
are some of the most general characterizations that just aren’t helpful
as we try and figure out how to solve the problem.

“What we’re trying to do is identify those game-changers in every
area of concern related to sexual assault. And it starts with things
like sexual harassment and lack of respect for people and inclusion and
diversity and those things that make people conscious of treating each
other with respect from the day they walk into the door to our Air
Force, and why it’s so important, and why everyone is critically
important and deserves to be treated that way. And it goes on to how do
you prevent the crime from ever occurring? How do you deter people who
are prone to do this? How do you ensure you create climates of respect
where other people will not allow it to occur or allow behavior that
could lead to it to occur? And then in those terrible situations where
it does happen, how do you make sure you do the investigation properly?
How do you make sure you care for the victim properly, which also helps
the investigation and the prosecution? How do you prosecute cases in a
most effective way so that perpetrators are punished in my view to the
maximum extent of the law, and then how do you ensure that no
perpetrator slips through this dragnet and is allowed to do it more than
once? All that takes an awful lot of effort and then you start with the
follow-up care to the victim, the victim’s family, etc., because the
care doesn’t end when the trial’s over. And so those are the kinds of
things that we’re trying to focus on and we’re working it pretty hard.”

04/04/2013

The commander of Fort Hood and III Corps, Lt. Gen. Mark Milley, is
headed to Afghanistan along with 500 soldiers from the post. They
“cased” the colors today and will unfurl them again when they arrive in
Kabul.

These ceremonies used to be big news. Now, they’re something of a
ho-hum affair for the public, though not to the families who see loved
ones head off for war once again and wonder when the revolving door will
stop.

The 10th anniversary of the war in Iraq gives me cause to think a lot
about all this. I was there, and on this week in 2003 wrote a diary
entry that captured the nuts and bolts of a battle but missed a much
bigger war.

“Euphrates Bridge River Battle,” I called it on the first page of a
weathered reporter’s notebook that is dotted by smudges of Iraqi sand
on every page.

It was early morning, 4:50 a.m. Thursday, April 3. We had crossed
that bridge 12 hours before in a Humvee that had plastic doors and jelly
windows, Iraqis fighting as troops from the 1st Brigade rolled onward.

The Iraqis fell where they stood. One fighter we passed lay dead with
his AK-47 in his arms, a black scorpion scrambling past him as the
span shook.

“More enemy advances toward our position just a few miles east of the
Euphrates,” the early morning entry continues. “We’re south of
Baghdad.”

I went off to Kuwait as the deployments began at Fort Hood after
9/11, and recall boarding the bus that took hundreds of soldiers in
their desert uniforms and body armor to a jumbo jet at Robert Gray Army
Airfield.

That was the beginning of the war in Iraq, a time when two brigades
carved out camps in Kuwait’s northern desert, a miserable place at any
time of year, but especially summer, when temperatures hit 115 degrees
or more.

San Antonio Express-News’ photographer Bahram Mark Sobhani and I
spent 10 days in Kuwait a couple of months or so after the terrorist
attacks, living in small trailers on a built-up base and traveling out
to the desert each day, interviewing troops and going on patrols. We
watched Camps Pennsylvania, New York and Virginia go up, and knew
then we’d be back. And indeed, we were there a week before the March 20,
2003, invasion.

This week 10 years ago, the Iraqis mounted a furious counterattack
against a lightly held U.S. position on the east side of the
900-foot-long bridge, a crucial turning point in the war. There actually
were two battles, the first occurring the day before and the
second starting early the next morning.

There was nothing to stop the 3rd Infantry Division from taking
Baghdad if its men held the bridge and a nearby T-intersection defended
by maybe 120 GIs, four M1 tanks and five Bradley armored personnel
carriers.

At least 5,000 Iraqis rushed toward the American position, where the
3rd ID’s soldiers were starting to run low on bullets, artillery and
tank rounds.

“Good impacts,” Senior Airman Dan Housley said.

Housley and his boss, Capt. Shad Magann, called in the airstrikes
that wasted Iraqi T-72 ranks and Russian-made armored personnel
carriers. Stacks of planes dropped Joint Direct Atttack Munitions, or
JDAMs, on hapless enemy troops who had no night-fighting capabilities.

The Americans, of course, preferred to fight at night.

“It’s sort of what everybody puts in their mind as what a battle is
supposed to look like based on the movies, but it is much more vivid
when you’re there in person and you see the incredible amount of
concentrated fire in a relatively small place that we were able to bring
to bear,” said Maj. Gen. Will Grimsley, who led the 3rd Infantry
Division’s 1st Brigade at the time.

Tanks led by Lt. Col. Ernest “Rock” Marcone, commander of the 3-69th
armored battalion, fired high explosive rounds from great distances.

Artillery rained on the Iraqis as they closed on the intersection.

So, too, did the JDAMs.

Magann told one tank commander to fire a single high-explosive round
at a T-72 after it rounded a bend in the road, and said his airplanes
would cake care of the armored truck behind it. Suddenly, there was a
bright flash followed by huge secondary explosion, the flames rising
hundreds of feet.

The tank was gone, and soon the trucks behind it were obliterated as well.

“What kind of fuse do you have in your JDAMs?” Magann, now a major in
the Air Force Reserve flying A-10 Warthogs. asked one of the pilots.

“Instantanous,” the pilot replied.

Magann sat in a Humvee working a laptop while talking to the pilots
above our position. Bathed in the computer’s bright light, he made a
perfect target for a sniper but kept reading the grid on his screen,
calling in airstrikes.

“Twenty-vehicle convoy,” he reported.

“There were some pretty good southeast convoy explosions,” Housley,
now a C-130 pilot with the Georgia Air National Guard, told Magann.

An hour passed and first light was near, but the attackers kept coming – and so did the JDAMs, tank rounds and artillery.

“It was just a mishmash and they dismounted all those guys, all the
infantrymen, and that’s unfortunately where most of the killing was, was
the Iraqi (army) infantry, Republican Guard infantry as well as the
special forces guys. They were moving almost like you used to think the
old Soviets would do, in line-formation waves,” Grimsley recently
recalled.

We had taken a scary ride on a bridge to what appeared to be a
lopsided victory but was, as it would turn out, an early chapter
to forever war.

In the margin of my notes I listed the subject of that day’s story:
“Anatomy of an airstrike,” and I know why I saw it that way. Hundreds of
Iraqis died in both bridge battles, while the Americans lost two killed
and two wounded.

Magann was on the radio, updating the combatants, and even if the
ground forces had run out of ammunition those planes would have kept
coming.

“Be advised we got the enemy halted and off of the road,” he said.

The Iraqis had been stopped for the moment. But they would be back.

Original story linked here: http://blog.mysanantonio.com/military/2013/04/a-scary-ride-on-a-bridge-to-forever-war/

04/01/2013

When Air Force basic training instructor Peter Vega Maldonado cut a
plea bargain and went on trial a year ago this week, some may not have
seen what was coming – a series of seemingly endless trials.

But another basic training instructor faces a special court-martial
today, and after Staff Sgt. William Romero is tried, two others will
follow this month.

He could get a year in jail if convicted of having illicit
relationships with four women in technical training as well as
committing adultery, but there is more to the Air Force’s worst-ever sex
scandal than the banging of a gavel and a judge’s ruling on guilt or
innocence.

Ask Virginia Messick about that.

Or her parents.

Now living in California, Messick is 21 and wrestling with demons
that resemble combat PTSD, but were born in Air Force basic training.
Her training instructor, then-Staff Sgt. Luis Walker, was supposed to be
a role model for every recruit, the very embodiment of the Air Force’s
core values of integrity, service before self and excellence.

He wasn’t.

Busted to the lowest rank and now doing 20 years at the U.S.
Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., he preyed on 10 women
in basic training, one of them Messick. He lured her to a vacant
dormitory, where they had sex. Messick now says she was raped, but the
allegation wasn’t made at Walker’s trial last summer and he wasn’t
convicted of it.

Whatever happened, she’s a much different person these days.

Messick doesn’t get out much. A shut-in much of the time, she carries
a knife in her purse. She won’t answer the door if someone knocks. She
notices if anything in the house has been moved.

And in addition to hyper-vigilance, a classic PTSD trait, she has trouble sleeping. And there are nightmares.

As a child and later a teenager, Virginia Messick was the kid no one
worried about, a cheerleader at Baker High School in Florida who made
friends easily.

“She was the one you didn’t have to worry about when she went to
school. There was never going to be a question of her grades. She got
it, she picked it right up,” said her father, retired Air Force Tech.
Sgt. Tracy Simmons, 49, of Midwest City, Okla.

“She could make friends in a heartbeat. She was bubbly, she was
happy. She didn’t become a cheerleader by being a wallflower. She was
outgoing, she was scared of nothing.”

After basic training, she was lost, disillusioned angry and sometimes out of control.

“In one act by one person, she went to the complete opposite end of the spectrum,” her dad said.

Marla Simmons described her daughter as strong and self-sufficient,
and proud of following her father and a grandfather into the Air Force.
But she could tell something was wrong even when Messick was in
technical training. Things later got so much worse, Simmons wanted to
commit her daughter.

“Jenny went though all the stages of being raped. There was denial
and then there was shame, then she wanted to hurt herself. She was
angry,” said Simmons, 47, of Baker, Fla.

“It’s all come in stages and my daughter, you d never have to look at
her and wonder if she was happy until after it happened. Then you could
see would be OK one minute and then she would be completely unglued the
next.”

Now retired in Hattiesburg, Miss., he thinks of writing a book about
the invasion because its success was overshadowed by an insurgency that
transformed the fortunes of America, and Iraq, only a few months later.

“I was in Israel last week and gave a desert warfare presentation to
the IDF, and as I go over it I’m amazed at how well the 3rd Infantry
Division soldiers fought and what all they accomplished,” Blount said in
a recent interview. “A lot of that’s been kind of overshadowed because
of the insurgency and all the things that happened after we got to
Baghdad.”

That’s true. But to have seen the 3rd Infantry Division at war was
also to know that it reflected its commander. An Austin native whose
father was an Air Force pilot, Blount would have happily followed in his
dad’s footsteps if not for bad eyesight. But he loved tanks, and so the
Army was an easy second choice.

In command of the division, he was shrewd but low-key, the kind of
leader who gave his subordinates the latitude to make decisions and do
their jobs without micromanagement – something no one in Iraq’s
Republican Guard could do and a failing that ultimately sealed Saddam
Hussein’s fate.

But more on that later, and more on other issues that arose after the
lightning victory, the decision to disband the Iraqi army chief among
them. One of Blount’s brigade commanders, Will Grimsley, neatly summed
up the working relationship between the boss and his lieutenants.

Now a two-star general who is chief of staff of the U.S. Strategic
Command at Offut AFB, Neb., Grimsley said he and his contemporaries had
trust in their superiors, trust in each other and trust from the top
down as well.

As an example, he knew and trusted his fellow brigade commanders so
well that he never worried about his flanks as the 1st Brigade, the unit
that photographer Mark Sobhani and I were embedded with, charged toward
Baghdad, conquering the country in only 21 days.

‘We knew that we were going to be able to do this because we all
trusted each other,” Grimsley said, adding that Blount gave them a great
deal of freedom to command. “We were never interfered with by the
division. We were enabled by the division.”

Good working relationships are the cornerstone of any success story, and you will hear more about them in the coming days.

But one story sums up Blount well for me. I was interviewing him as
the occupation began and, as always, he offered a realistic assessment
of where things stood. He clearly knew that Baghdad had a world of
problems and that neither he nor anyone else could wave a magic wand to
fix them. Still, Blount was relaxed. His men were on the streets doing
patrols and trying to fix a tattered city that symbolized a broken
nation.

There were rumors about Saddam coming out of hiding to lead a
rebellion against the American forces in Iraq, and as I mentioned that,
he chuckled.

“I hope so,” he said.

You could tell he would really have welcomed that attack, and that
was the essence of Buford Blount. He never boasted but never lacked for
confidence. And that attitude could be found everywhere down the line,
from Grimsley to the youngest platoon leader in the division. It was
something to behold, and I recall thinking before the invasion that it
was arrogance.

It wasn’t. As the western actor Walter Brennan liked to say in a 1960s-era TV series, “No brag, just fact.”

But so many years later, what 3rd ID and the 1st Marine Expeditionary
Force did in those three weeks of combat has been obscured by the great
sandstorm of stalemate born in the insurgency. And you can see why
Blount would like to make sure that what they did isn’t lost to history.

Original link is here: http://blog.mysanantonio.com/military/2013/03/a-victory-lost-to-history/